So I’ve gone and bought an Oculus Quest. It happened spontaneously last week, during my one-night stint in the city, which is about as much as I’ve been able to tolerate since the three months of self-isolation in my Parkdale apartment. The rest of my time is mostly spent in farmland two-hours from Toronto, near a town called Meaford. My family has a farmhouse here that we rent out during the colder months and take advantage of as much as possible throughout the summer. Various friends have come to visit / indulge in the country sprawl, overlapping stints from my mom and her partner Hugh. The in-between times are the most interesting though, when it’s just me alone here, left to my own endeavours. There’s nothing like being on your own in the country, where you can sink deep into your thoughts uninterrupted, swim around a pond in search of frogs or go for long bike rides as the sun slowly sets over the fields. I also recently acquired an inflatable kayak, as part of my summer 2020 solo pack. The day I bought the Quest, I promptly put it aside and took my kayak out on the Humber Bay for its first real test-drive (outside of a pond). Nature takes precedence.

I had done enough research to decide that the Quest was the right fit, but there were some assumptions involved as well. First of all, the Quest is a standalone head mounted display (HMD from here on in), meaning it has its own processor and therefore doesn’t need to be connected to a desktop computer. For years I have been attempting to craft out my own version of the term ‘digital nomad’, although it usually doesn’t entail the beach-side office on a remote island but rather just being able to trudge around easily enough through the winter with all my office cargo crammed into my backpack. Since hearing that the fall semester would, like the spring and summer, also be online, I’ve been investing in the idea of being as untethered as possible to a geographical pin. So yes, I did have visions of mornings spent kayaking some river or other, followed by and afternoon of VR painting from a grassy field where boundaries, or obstacles to crash into, are of no concern. More importantly, I’m gambling on the wireless independence of the Quest soon becoming the widespread standard in mainstream XR devices. I’m putting down $600 (what I spent on the Kijiji purchase – more on that shortly), that in the not-too-distant future, HMDs will be more affordable, considerably more lightweight and definitely cordless. It seems like the logical course for the broader market outside of gamers and VFX studio artists. With that rationale, the Quest is like the iMac G5 in 2004: the first of its kind and likely full of glitches that will be ironed out by the second version. But if you’re willing to work within its awkward constraints, it will prove it’s got legs. Besides, the Quest is backed by two preceding generations of the Vive, the HMD that made waves when Oculus first stepped into the arena and resulted in an acquisition by Facebook. Lastly, it can still access PC processing power if you do opt to connect it. I don’t exactly have one of those (Macbook 2015 here), but I figured I’d just cross that bridge when I came to it.
I first checked Kijiji, and saw that someone named Daniel was selling a year-old Quest (128 GB) for $ 600 all in. But I wanted the padding of a return policy and a store warranty, so I located and reserved one from a Best Buy near me. Two mask-touting lineups later (one to get inside the store, the next in the online orders queue), I was punching my debit info into the reader while confirming the usual 30-day turnaround on returns. I was given a hard no from three workers behind the till, who informed me that no head-worn devices could be returned once out of the box. They said this wasn’t even a Covid thing, it was already in place as a store hygiene policy, not unlike trying to return underwear or a bikini. I bought it anyway but wasn’t thrilled about it, as there was no real advantage in spending the extra money. I left to make a dash to the Canadian Tire, where I had to pick up some camping goods before the store closed, but sent a chat message to Daniel on Kijiji along the way. I didn’t see the point in buying the store model if I couldn’t return it, and I knew that there had been no new release models of the Quest since it first went to market. So after a few messages with him on the spot, I’d abandoned my Canadian Tire would-be purchases (a dry bag and tin meal-ware) to queue up again at Best Buy, this time in the Returns line. Less than an hour later, I was testing out the Oculus Quest next to Daniel’s Ford Focus, in the parking lot of a No Frills in Mississauga. Daniel was a timid guy but the polite confidence in his demeanour spoke for him and underlined his words with honesty. He’d just simply not gotten as much use out of it as intended. He’d kept it in pristine condition though, and it came with the travel case. So all in all, I saved $ 232.00 thanks to Daniel.
Then I headed straight for Old Mill station for my kayak ride along the Humber River. It was glorious but took much longer than expected and I found myself scrambling to deflate it, hungry and exhausted, in yet another parking lot long after the sun had gone down. When I got home, I ate then passed out straightaway, very much unlike me so that’s saying a lot about the benefits of the kayak.

At 7am the following morning I poured my coffee. Then in the bright July sunlight of my living room, I stepped into the dark otherworld of the Quest goggles. The HMD was heavy but I liked its familiarity to a diving mask. An hour later, I had set up my account and was entering Tilt Brush for the first time. It’s going to sound cheesy, I know. There’s no way of not sounding cheesy while enforcing your love of scuba diving on other people, and in this tangent of tangents, it feels all the more relevant here.

I grew up in love with the idea of scuba diving. I was one of those kids you could never, and I mean really never, get out of the pool. When I was 9 or 10 while visiting my uncle in Halifax, I got hypothermia from snorkelling for over an hour in the frigid Atlantic, when everyone else was doing those mad dashes in and out. Two divers had spotted me out there while walking along the beach and expressed their concern to my mom, who I guess knew it was pointless to interfere with my obsession with lobsters and starfish in their natural habitat. I came out with purple lips and was wrapped in layers of towels, still staring excitedly at the ocean all the while. Sometime on that same trip, I was rooting around in my uncle’s basement and discovered a giant book of underwater photography by none other than Jaques Cousteau. I poured over each picture all afternoon, deciding that I would become a marine biologist and then somehow, a sea artist like him. Except instead of photography, my version needed to be about drawing.

A year or two later on a family holiday in Cuba, I got my first chance to dive. I was 11 when the legal age is 12, with a weight and size that likely fell far short of the requirements. But the instructor, Miriam, at our 3-star resort was charmed by my determination and let me try out the equipment in the pool. I remember realizing that the tank was heavier than me and that it was going to be a problem, but I held myself up somehow and pulled off a convincing act enough to be allowed to go out with my family on the tour. The next day we set out on a boat; just the driver, Miriam and my family. I was of course the first one in the water, and sure enough, I sank like a bag of bricks. Miriam and the boat driver jumped in after me and yanked me up. I was forced to stay on the boat while they continued with the tour. When I’d decided that I’d had enough of sitting in the sun in silence with the driver, put on my mask, fins and snorkel and hopped in for a rogue free-dive, he didn’t try to stop me. I tracked the group down and dove in, meeting them at their depth underwater, so hellbent I was to be on that dive.

A few years ago I got my advanced PADI (diving) license while in the Philippines. My instructor Krista and I had become friends the way you do when you share an obscure love of being underwater and have crossed paths in a seaside village where your sleeping quarters are side by side because you both opted for the cheap hotel closest to the shoreline. Part of the exam involves being given a simple sequence of math equations, like 5 + 8 – 9 x 4 +2 / 3, and being timed for your response. This happens twice; once in the dive shop, and then again a few hours later while 30 meters below the surface. What’s being checked isn’t your ability to do simple equations, it’s the difference in time it takes to answer with and without pressure and / or excessive nitrogen. Yes, you’re given the same equation in both circumstances. On the dive, Krista handed me a small piece of whiteboard and a pencil. The math equation was incidental – I think I had a lapse of something around 3 seconds, which fell comfortably into the ‘normal’ box. I was instantly transfixed by the whiteboard, pencil, and the fact that they worked together underwater.
Once the exam was over, Krista led us to a shipwreck. I released enough air from my lungs to enable me to sit on the seabed, and I began to sketch. Krista was transfixed by the act of it, and over the course of the next few days, we set out on several more dive-sketch missions. I could feel my brain working double-time to stay alert at that depth, as though there were a layer of time and space that needed translating.

A year later I was in Mexico, at it again. This time I was trying out wax crayon on plexiglass, in hopes of being able to trace my subject matter. It was an idea that sounded better in my head than in practice. But the level of joy I got from doing it, even from just waking up knowing that my day would be spent like that, was enough to reinforce the pact I’d made with myself in the Philippines that if in five years it still wasn’t ‘working out’ for me at home in Toronto, I’d set up as a scuba instructor like Krista to earn my keep and draw the sea world in my spare time.

All this to say, what excited me that morning last week, first when I slipped the googles over my head and then again when I painted my first stroke in Tilt Brush, is that I think I’ve found a way around packing in my life for my own version of Zihuatanejo, at least not just yet (2020 marks five years, by the way).

My session lasted nearly two hours, and ended only because I had a Zoom discussion scheduled with my classmates. In that time, I painted a school of fish, an ocean floor of kelp and a large fish swimming through it all. I tried to paint the surface above me, expecting to see the paint act like shimmering light, but no matter what I tried, it remained dark and muddy. I quickly realized that this was Google’s built-in lighting scheme, and that I was standing within a dome that had a light source pointed at it overhead. Meaning to say, any paint surface that was above me and on a horizontal plane would be entirely blocked from light on its underbelly. But this led to the discovery of the ‘advanced’ mode, where lighting can be adjusted, among other things. I’ve got a ways to go in learning those things.